How the English Language Helped Me Become an Egyptian Poet.
Poet Maged Zaher will be in town and reading and talking at Machine Project on April, 21st at 8 pm. Maged’s an awesome poet and a vibrant and compelling speaker with a lot to say about aesthetics and politics in Egypt and here in the States. His new book about going back to Cairo right after last year’s revolution is a great ride. The little poems it’s made of are full of discomfiting, confusing, sparkling and hilarious junctures and juxtapositions of images, speech, feelings and events.
Maged will be reading mainly from his latest manuscript “The revolution happened and you didn’t call me”, which is scheduled to come out from Tinfish press this summer. Maged will also be giving a talk – in between reading the poems – about his beginnings as an Arabic language poet, and his move to English a few years after his arrival in the US. The talk will touch upon the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the context of both Arabic and English “experimental” poetics.